As a professional Lighting Consultant and a consumer, the best advice is to buy ceiling fans from companies that have replacement parts for their fans. Harbor Breeze and Hampton Bay are made exclusively for Home Depot and Loews. They tend to change the styles very often and discontinue a lot of products very quickly. Not good if you have a problem down the road. I used to love Hunter but have recently had problems with 4 originals. You might look at Emerson, Monte Carolo, Craftmade, the brands that are sold in Lighting Showrooms. Showroom do not want trouble with fans and they tend to sell better quality when it comes to fans. The older fan companies keep parts for a long time. These DIY fans are cheaper for a reason.......

Have an electrician take down the old light and take a look at the connection. You might need a stronger box, or not. That is a simple fix. Our small LR fan came with the DW but we did have a larger fan/lights installed last year. I think he may have replaced the box. As an aside, Don't put a fan anywhere near the kitchen stove if it is gas. Could blow the flame out, even on low fan setting. I couldn't use my fan in our last house when I needed it most - hot humid days :-(.

Just move your plate heigth up a foot or so. You could cut through the roof to install a 2x12 beam on top of the plate. This will put the facia higher than the existing facia. Or you could move the beams in & give yourself a bigger overhang on the porch so the facia meets. Dropping the floor a step is always an option as you mentioned. Al

I guess it depends on what one's used to Standard 8' ceilings here were a challenge to me in our new house, because it was the lowest ceiling heigh I ever had. I'm not from the US and other countries I lived in had a different standard that was higher ceiling(maybe due to metric system lol). Growing up in the older part of a very old big city-ceilings were even higher. But I loved the house a lot and was willing to work with whatever it had. And it had 8' ceiling everywhere but the entry(which by the way was altered by the previous owners to become higher) and the living room. 7 in the dining but during remodel we were able to raise them up a foot. My way of handling the thing was: a) a thought of crown moulding-previous owners put it in their master bath(tiny supermodest space really)-but I swear to you it looked at least a foor higher than the adjusting bedroom. this thought never became reality though because expenses grew and had to give up on some things. crown moldings were the first to go. lol b) skylights. previous owners had installed several and they drastically change perception of height and space..for the better. so we installed another one when we had our addition built. It also helped to break rectangularity of the room..we also didn't put a door between it and a master bath but left arch opening between them (the toilet got its own small room of course). Otherwise we'd be left with extremely boring room that's too long, too dark, and doesn't inspire any desire to stay there. Giving it more depth and light helped tremendously c) and very important as I agonized over it. Painting the celings the same color-or the color that would look like the same color(which was, in our case either 50% or 66% percent of the initial formula), as the walls. The lines blend, you don't have this feeling the ceiling is about to fall on you. I'm 5.4 so not tall at all..but I can be sensitive to spaces, and sometimes weirdly sensitive. Part of my physique. Lol. d) ditching some common rules. I did install central fixtures where it made sense, and pendants, and sconces..and it took attention away from the lower ceiling, because now you had something interesting to look at instead of calculating ceiling height I have table lamps and floor lamps too, so layers of lighting. I read so much about it all and was in that state of don't do this and don't do that..until I became very tired of it and just took from all this reading whatever I deemed helpful and disregarded everything else. Freedom! now your ceilings are lower, and your kitchen sounds challenging. Regarding kitchen-Kitchen forum is (justly so) considered the best in the matters of planning and advice on everything kitchen, so post your plan there and I believe you'll get many helpful thoughtful answers, regarding layout, workability, etcetera They are very sensitive to specific needs of specific person/family in a specific kitchen, and your plan with dimensions and if possible photos of the space will be very helpful to them to suggest things specific to your kitchen tailored to your needs/wants/budget etc. If you ask very general question it's great when you just want to have an interesting discussion. But if you're willing to get specific advice, and often very good one, I highly advise Kitchens forum. Just copy-paste your question there, and add even a basic rough plan with dimensions. And several pics to show different walls and how kitchen connects to other rooms in the house. I remember myself daring to ask on some site that had this option "Ask a designer" a general question "What do I do with low ceiling" and I got a very kind but very standard answer to paint everything white. It's okay, one can paint everything white of course; especially works well with high ceilings, architectural moldings, and in Paris lol), but didn't provide me with any insight. Sorry for the long post!